It gives me great joy when I stumble upon a book I haven’t opened in years, only to discover flowers pressed between its pages, perhaps from an important event, tucked in with sheets of kitchen paper. The memories come flooding back. Today, the dried and pressed flowers I found were from my mother’s funeral—one rose and one thistle. Bittersweet memories, both sad and happy.
The book I’m sharing this week is Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine by René Redzepi. Many of you will recognise the name Noma, the iconic restaurant that put Copenhagen on the food map and defined the new Nordic way of cooking: keeping it simple, using clever techniques, and cooking with ingredients native to the region. I never had the chance to eat there, as reservations were impossible to come by—waiting lists were booked solid, and seasons sold out in a matter of minutes. But it was widely credited with sparking the trend of foodie tourism.
René was instrumental in reinventing Nordic cuisine. He honed his craft in kitchens like El Bulli and The French Laundry, two temples of gastronomy. He quickly became a world-famous chef; someone I had the pleasure of meeting once and seeing cook at a demonstration. He’s a master of taking food to unprecedented levels, always with a clever twist.
There’s a lot of wild, inventive stuff on the plates in this book—Danish squid with strawberries and verbena oil, celeriac and Icelandic moss, seaweed and egg yolk, musk ox with fresh young garlic and milk skin, caramelised garlic. I did get to taste his food once at a posh dinner in London, where he cooked a course. It was raw razor clam with horseradish and parsley—simple, clean, and bursting with flavour.
This is a beautiful book, visually stunning, but if I’m honest, I’ll probably never cook anything from it. It’s just a bit too much for me. Still, I love leafing through the pages and looking at the pictures.
